Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report on Smyrna. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
18/43 page 18
![f 1 1 Era of Turkish occupation. > See pages 104-106. j Held by ! Knights of t Rhodes. | 18 and destruction which the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought with them. It was in the thirteenth century that the castle, whose ruins still overlook the Town of Smyrna, and the Palace at Nymphi, the favourite residence of John Vataces, were built, each of which, by their parallel and horizontal rows of flat tiling interposed between stone masonry, shows, did we know it from no other sources, the comparatively recent epoch of its erection. [We may observe, that a totally dif- ferent style of building is observable in the castle opposite the mouth of the Hermus at the entrance of the bay. This fort is of Turkish construction, and was erected at the times of the Venetian wars, A.D. 1656.] In the fourteenth century Asia Minor was parcelled out by different Turkish chieftains into separate principalities, which maintained an independent ex- istence as such until the days of Bajazet, a.d. 1400. The whole of the maritime country from Rhodes to Scutari came at this time finally into the hands of the Turks. A band of Catalans were invited by the Greek Emperor Andronicus, a.d. 1303, to lend their aid towards averting the catastrophe, but the Greeks have left it on record, that they found the friendship of the Catalans more hurtful than the enmity of the Turks. In 1313 Aidin, one of the Turkish emirs, possessed himself of Tralles and Smyrna, and his name is still borne by the former of these two places in one of the fairest valleys in the world. After a reign of twelve years Aidin trans- r mitted the government of his principality to his son Omar. But whilst Omar was absent with his fleet on an expedition in aid of Cantacuzene into the sea of j Marmora, the Knights of Rhodes made a descent upon Smyrna and seized the castle on the waters | edge, from which all the attempts made by the Turks l to dislodge them were ineffectual for a period of I fifty-seven years. When we consider that this build- ing is completely commanded by the fort on Mount Pagus, which was in the hands of the Turks, and that it is scarcely elevated at all above the level of the sea, which also was from time to time in the : _ 1k](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22356666_0020.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
